Ask Slashdot: How To Begin Work In IT Freelancing?

king.purpuriu writes "I'm a computer science high school student, and I'm looking for some work in IT freelancing. I have had a interest in computers and programming for a while, and I began learning on my own before high school. I would like to gain some experience (e.g. what the bulk of the jobs in various markets require, various technologies/frameworks and their usage) and possibly make some money on the side (not expecting too much; at this point, any non-negative amount will do). Key areas are web development, app programming and scripting. What solutions do you recommend? Any tips or tricks of which I should be aware? How should I deal with payment (in terms of fees and commissions; I'm from European country), and what type of work should I seek out? I would also be willing to do some small stuff for free in order to gain experience (small, static sites, small scripts, etc.)."

Comments

Don't start as a freelancer

[Tim Ward]

What people are hiring in a freelancer is experience and skills and experience and ability to hit the ground running and experience. Oh, and experience.

Do ten years in a proper job first to learn this stuff.

Advice from a senior IT professional

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't! Your time is better invested in actual studies, where each university credit will lead to a better position in the future job market. Study harder, study more. Writing code is done by thousands of indians and chinese, and you DO NOT want to be in a position to compete with them.

I would strongly recommend you to get out of the programming/IT sector all together. It is NOT a future business in Europe. It pays poorly, and is subject to massive outsourcing to Asia.

If you must work in IT, consider something which is close to the customer: Sales, Management, Relationship intensive design tasks. DO NOT ENTER A CAREER IN IT PROGRAMMING. You will be competing with millions of poorly paid Chinese and Indians and companies will always outsource to the lowest bidder.

I have 20+ years experience in IT, and I've seen 5 companies outsource all European operations to Asia already, and I see it happening all the time over and over again.

Study hard, study more. Study something which can't be outsourced: M.D., Lawyer, anything in construction.
  Avoid IT like the plague!!

Re:Don't.

[luis_a_espinal]

I kinda feel like it won't be long until programming is in the same position. Scientists all have a decent enough grasp of programming that they cobble together their own software/algorithms without the need for a software engineer.

Decent enough grasp of programming? Do you even know what that even means. I work, and I have worked, with scientists and EE majors who write copious amount of code (which sadly I have to deal with), code that looks like this (yes, this is the type of code I've had to deal with from such scientists and EE majors, and to be honest some CS majors, I'm not making this shit up):

do{
if (!condition1){ break; }
else{
// do some logic
if(! condition1_a}{ break; }
else{
// do some logic, and
// NOW, HERE IS THE KICKER, SPRINKLED HERE AND THERE if( error ){ // do a recursive call hoping the error goes away }
}
}

if( ! condition2 ){ break; }
else{
// some other stupid logic intended to mimic a goto
// statement because gotos are evil, but this shit is ok
}

// .... cue several dozen more tests like these..

if ( ! condition_I_lost_count_how_many ){ break; }
else{
// do some more logic that you cannot longer follow,
// and which makes you can to commit seppuku, and
// hang yourself with your own guts
}
while(0);

People who, intelligent as they might be, still don't fucking get why it is important to layer your functions, as opposed to opting for direct access to the same set of pointers spread all over the place. People who tell me they can write a compiler just with a look-up table based search/replace approach. People who tell me programming is nothing but if statements and for loops and that encapsulation and modularity are just academic shit that no one really uses.

Better yet, I've had project managers of a scientist/EE background telling me, and I quote, "we do not need a design, by the time we are in the middle of it, code is different from the design and things changes, so a design is superfluous" (this for critical systems with SLOC counts in the millions.)

It is a meme so consistent across companies it cannot easily be dismissed as a generalization.

You, sir, don't know what the fuck you are talking about, and this mentality is the root of all the evil code monkey shit that we see in the software industry.